Today we’re starting a short series on prayer, and looking at a prayer which Gideon prayed. It’s in Judges 6:36-40.
Introduction
First, let’s look at the situation Gideon was in before we look at his prayer. We may think, ‘We pray, God answers. Simple.’ But when we look at what was going on at the time of Gideon, we’ll see that it isn’t quite so simple!
It’s about 1200 BC, give or take. Perhaps 200 years previously, Moses had led the Israelites out of Egypt to the land of Canaan. On the way they had fought and defeated a group of people called the Midianites. The Midianites were living in north-west Arabia at the time, as shown on this map. Archaeologists have found some evidence of the Midianites in the form of pottery, for example.
So, there was no love lost between the Israelites and the Midianites. The Midianites were still on the border of Canaan and after the Israelites settled in Canaan, they regularly raided them. In fact, they did a bit more than simply raid. At the beginning of chapter 6 we meet Gideon beating out wheat in the wine press to hide the wheat from the Midianites. In other words, the Midianites were all around. They had occupied the land of Canaan.
Why? Can you look at 6:3-4? It says:
…the Midianites, Amalekites and other eastern peoples invaded the country … They came up with their livestock and their tents like swarms of locusts … they invaded the land to ravage it.
The Israelites were in a crisis. Their situation was unbearable and unsustainable. But Gideon had a low expectation of God doing anything and a low expectation of God doing anything through him.
God has a condition!
Why should Gideon not expect God to act? That sounds funny, doesn’t it? Can you flip back to the beginning of chapter 2? I’m starting from half-way through verse 1. God says:
I brought you up from Egypt, and brought you into the land that I had promised to your ancestors. I said, “I will never break my covenant with you ...”
Go on to verse 2:
For your part, do not make a covenant with the inhabitants of this land; tear down their altars.
THIS WAS GOD’S INSTRUCTION: ‘Do not make a covenant with the inhabitants of this land; tear down their altars.’
Now verse 3:
But you have not obeyed my command. See what you have done! So now I say, I will not drive them out before you; but they shall become adversaries to you, and their gods shall be a snare to you.
God has told the Israelites, ‘I will not drive them out before you.’ In other words, ‘I’m not going to help you’! That might seem extraordinary to some of us. We just assume that God always helps. Why is God not going to help? (I’m just checking you’re following!) Because ‘you have not obeyed my command’. What was God’s command? ‘Do not make a covenant with the inhabitants of this land; tear down their altars.’
How do you suppose this situation could be fixed? Is anyone thinking, ‘Tear down some altars’?
There’s a very basic lesson here. God is telling the Israelites, as plain as day, ‘You get my help as long as you keep my covenant.’ I can’t emphasise strongly enough how important this is. It’s key to the whole concept of prayer. When we pray, we hope God will answer our prayers; we hope that God will help us. But, as in the case of the Israelites, God might not want to help us!
At the heart of God’s relationship with man is a covenant. God gives his people many wonderful promises. Preachers love to tell congregations God’s wonderful promises. But God also makes demands. Preachers are not always quite as good at telling congregations about God’s demands. But just like those ancient Israelites, we have to do what God demands if we want to experience his promises.
God affirms Gideon
The Israelites, in short, were in a mess. They were not obeying God and God was not helping them – for very good reason.
The Israelites cry out to God. That’s a good start. An angel of the Lord comes and sits under an oak near to where Gideon lives. It seems like a kind of relaxed thing to do. No one recognizes him as an angel at this stage. Then the angel says to Gideon, ‘God is with you, mighty warrior’.
The angel says: ‘God is with you’. God may be annoyed with the Israelites. But he hasn’t abandoned them. Then the angel says ‘mighty warrior’.
God doesn’t start by telling Gideon to do something. God starts by telling Gideon who he is. He affirms Gideon.
I’ve looked at quite a number of sermons on this passage. Most of them take the view that Gideon was a coward. They assume Gideon was threshing wheat in the wine press because he was afraid. I imagine we’ve all heard the saying ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’. Sensible people avoid danger. If Gideon was threshing in such a way as to avoid a confrontation, it does not make him a coward, it makes him sensible. We are not called to place ourselves in harm’s way. Since most of the preachers on this passage think Gideon was a coward, they assume that the angel means that Gideon will be a mighty warrior. I prefer to think that Gideon already was a mighty warrior. He had the courage and skill for a fight. But he needed some encouragement.
But Gideon thinks the angel has got the wrong guy. ‘I’m a nobody’ he tells the angel. ‘My clan is the least in Israel, and I am the least in my clan’. This is an argument that Christians come out with over and over again. ‘I’m too young.’ ‘I’m too old.’ ‘I haven’t had the training.’ ‘I’m not smart enough.’ And so on. We all find excuses – and our excuses are not without justification. The simple reality is that the tasks God calls us to are beyond us. The angel – who we realize now is the Lord – replies, ‘But I will be with you, and you shall strike down the Midianites, every one of them.’ There’s the difference. The key player will be back in the game. With the Lord on our side we can’t lose. The Lord assures Gideon that he will be victorious. God affirms Gideon. It’s a great example to us. We need to be open to God affirming us and we need to affirm each other.
God has commissioned Gideon and we might think the story can now move on to Gideon preparing his forces. But a little more is required – one thing from Gideon’s side, and one thing from God’s. Gideon is a careful person and he wants some confirmation that it’s really God speaking. He asks for a sign. Gideon brings some food; the angel touches it with a staff and the food is consumed. Gideon is convinced.
Gideon listens and obeys
But God also has a demand. He tells Gideon (verse 25) ‘Tear down your father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah pole beside it.’
Does this sound familiar? God is asking Gideon to do what he demanded of the Israelites back in 2:2. ‘…do not make a covenant with the inhabitants of this land; tear down their altars.’ God is back on the same subject! Fix this – then we proceed. So, Gideon pulled down the altar at night. It was a little baby step of obedience. There was a certain risk in this. The local townspeople were quite unhappy when they found out. But God was happy. Gideon, at least, had obeyed him. The situation was restored. God would go with him. I find it extraordinary just how little was required in order for God to decide to help the Israelites again. I think God was very gracious.
Gideon does the right thing by asking for a sign
Great! God has commissioned Gideon. However, in the meantime, the pressure builds up. On to 6:33:
Now all the Midianites and the Amalekites and the people of the East came together, and they crossed the Jordan and encamped in the Valley of Jezreel.
Gideon knows that God has called him to deliver Israel and he calls for help. Verse 35:
And he sent messengers throughout all Manasseh, and they too were called out to follow him. And he sent messengers to Asher, Zebulun, and Naphtali, and they went up to meet them.
That’s great. The people respond to God’s call. At this point Gideon prays to God, ‘If you will save Israel by my hand, as you have said … please give me a sign ... then I shall know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you have said.’ Gideon wants the fleece to be wet and the ground dry. God gives Gideon the sign he asked for. Then Gideon prays to God once more. He asks for the same sign, but in reverse. The fleece should be dry and the ground wet. Once again, God gives Gideon the sign he asked for.
Did Gideon do the right thing by praying for a sign?
I’ve looked at quite a number of commentaries and sermons on the story of Gideon. With one voice they say that Gideon got it wrong. In their view, Gideon’s demand for a sign is evidence of a lack of faith.
‘Gideon essentially questions whether God has really called him’ – Chisholm.
‘Neither is he fully convinced of the power of God’ – Kuruvilla.
‘…he uses every means available to try to get out of the mission to which he has been called’ – Block.
‘The fleece incidents … are expressions of doubt and lack of faith … the fleece incidents are about Gideon’s unbelief’ – Lawson
‘Gideon should’ve trusted God instead of demanding a sign’ – a sermon.
‘Putting Out the Fleece is … an approach used by people like Gideon who lack the faith to trust God to do what He said He would do’ – a sermon.
At the beginning of the chapter, Gideon was threshing wheat in the wine press and the commentators I looked at described Gideon as a coward. Now commentators and preachers say that Gideon failed to demonstrate faith. However, the Bible says the opposite. The Bible holds Gideon up as a wonderful example of faith. Gideon is mentioned just once in the New Testament. It’s in Hebrews 11:32-33:
And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets— who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises…
Gideon isn’t a failure at all. He’s in the hall of fame. The writer of Hebrews takes the opposite view to these commentators and preachers. These commentators and preachers made a negative, critical assessment. God puts Gideon in the hall of fame. Do you imagine God is a nit-picky, critical god, always looking for fault? That isn’t what God is like at all!
If the writer of Hebrews thinks that Gideon is a shining example of faith then how do we view Gideon demanding a sign? Since God’s assessment of Gideon’s faith is positive, let’s take a look at this. Could it be that when Gideon asked for a sign, rather than demonstrating his unbelief, Gideon acted in a normal and responsible way?
I’ve been the director of two companies. If I set the company on a course that was risky or counter-intuitive I would think it quite normal for an employee to double-check the instructions I had given.
We should expect God to speak clearly
When God asks someone to do something very surprising, he gives very clear instructions. Let me give one example. After Jesus had risen, God wanted the early Christians to take the gospel to the Gentiles. But there was a problem. The early Christians were Jews, and they regarded Gentiles as unclean. God needed them to completely revise their idea of what was clean and unclean.
God gives Peter a vision of a sheet descending on the earth. In the sheet were all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds of the air. A voice tells Peter, ‘Rise, Peter; kill and eat.’ Peter refuses. The voice tells him: ‘What God has made clean, do not call common.’ This happens three times. Three times is pretty emphatic, isn’t it? Then at that moment some men come to the door and ask him to visit Cornelius, a centurion, who would have been unclean from a Jewish point of view. The fact that they arrive at exactly the moment when Peter is having a vision makes the point very clear.
Here we have an example of God telling Peter to do something that was very surprising to him. So, God speaks to Peter in an unmistakable way.
Paul says, ‘God is not a God of confusion.’ God isn’t in the business of giving unclear instructions.
Paul writes elsewhere, ‘if the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle?’ Paul wrote this, but it’s God’s word to us in the Bible. God tells us to speak intelligibly. God doesn’t tell us to do something he doesn’t do himself.
We should definitely expect that when God is telling us something, it will be clear to us, assuming we’re making some effort to listen!
In the next chapter we find that the combined army that Gideon faced was about 135,000 strong. Gideon had about 32,000 men with him. What was the likely outcome? Gideon was considering an action which no normal, responsible person would take without being very sure indeed.
When God called Gideon he said, “Go in this might of yours and save Israel from the hand of Midian; do not I send you?” The Midianites and Amalekites have now appeared in the area where Gideon lives. But God hasn’t told Gideon how he will save Israel.
Popular support doesn’t mean that something is right!
Gideon has called people to fight, and they have responded. Is that itself a sign that Gideon is on the right course? One commentator I read suggested that Gideon should have taken the fact that the people have responded as a sign that he was on the right path. That’s nonsense. It’s all too possible for something to look right and yet be quite wrong. Just because you have support for an idea doesn’t mean it’s right.
Gideon was careful in choosing a sign
In view of the huge risk, it was absolutely sensible for Gideon to check that he was hearing God correctly. God didn’t object at all. And Gideon was very careful.
Gideon first asked for the fleece to be wet and then the ground dry. Then I suppose he thought to himself, ‘Maybe that was what would have happened anyway.’ If we pray for a sign, but it’s something that would probably have happened anyway, then we can’t really take it as God’s leading!
To be on the safe side, Gideon asked for the fleece to be dry and the ground wet. I think Gideon was a bit of a scientist. I think he knew that if you repeat an experiment with all the variables the same, you get the same result. But this time, the result is different. Now Gideon is confident that God has given him a sign. He’s satisfied that God wants him to move forward, and he does.
Conclusion
We’re learning about prayer. We reflected on the idea of covenant and recognized that we need to listen and obey God if we hope that God will listen to our prayer and help us. Gideon didn’t make a mistake by asking for a sign. It was a thoroughly sensible thing to do. We should expect God to speak clearly, and especially when there’s a lot at stake. Like Gideon, we should pray to God when we’re facing major decisions, and we can ask God for a sign. We should be careful when asking for a sign and avoid choosing as a sign something that would probably happen anyway. Gideon’s prayer, and God’s response, should be a great encouragement that God is willing to give guidance to those who are really seeking to know his will.
Rosebery Park Baptist Church, Boscombe, Bournemouth, UK, 7th June 2020
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